Judging from the number of communities and cities striving or claiming to be sustainable and how often eco-development is invoked as the means for urban regeneration, it appears that sustainable and eco-development have become “the leading paradigm within urban development” (Whitehead 2003). But what is it that is driving these urban transformations? Clearly, there are many probable answers to this complex question and in what follows we will focus on one particular catalyst of change – urban design competitions. Considered as field changing events (Lampel & Meyer 2008, Anand and Jones 2008), urban design competitions are understudied mechanisms for bringing about field level changes. This paper examines how urban design competitions can bring about changes within two types of fields – professional fields and local geographical fields. The context for our study is urban regeneration in two cities in France and Denmark, both of which have been suffering from industrial decline and have invested in establishing “eco-districts”. Based on these two case studies we explore how the different parties involved in these urban development projects have developed innovative design templates and practices that can instantiate field level changes.

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In overlapping-generations economies with perfect financial markets and lumpsum
taxation, restrictions on the government budget deficits do not limit the
set of achievable allocations. For economies in which tax instruments are distortionary
and limited in number, deficits are irrelevant only in the unrealistic
case in which the number of tax instruments is large relative to the number
of policy goals. In particular, if the government can use only anonymous consumption
taxes, then achieving the prescribed deficits without changing the
equilibrium allocation will typically be impossible when the number of consumers
exceeds the number of commodities. A similar result holds if consumer
credit is (exogenously) restricted. Surprisingly, in this case, distortionary taxes
may be more likely than lump-sum taxes to lead to the irrelevance of government
deficits. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D51,
D91, E32.
Keywords: Balanced Budget, Balanced-Budget Amendment, Burden of the Public Debt,
Comparative Statics, Consumption Taxes, Credit Restrictions, Distortionary Taxes, Economic
Policy, Government Budget Deficit, Maastricht Treaty, Optimal Taxation, Overlapping
Generations.

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While much attention has been devoted to analyzing how the institutional framework and entrepreneurship impact growth, how economic policy and institutional design affect entrepreneurship appears to be much less analyzed. We try to explain cross-country differences in the level of entrepreneurship by differences in economic policy and institutional design. Specifically, we use the measures of economic freedom to ask which elements of economic policy making and the institutional framework that are responsible for the supply of entrepreneurship (our data on entrepreneurship are derived from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor). The combination of these two datasets is unique in the literature. We find that the size of government is negatively correlated with entrepreneurial activity but that sound money is positively correlated with entrepreneurial activity. Other measures of economic freedom are not significantly correlated with entrepreneurship.
JEL CODE: M13, O31, O50
KEYWORDS: Economic freedom, entrepreneurship, cross-country variation.

This paper investigates to what extent income growth in the Chinese provinces is linked to growth and income levels in neighboring provinces. We find that the rate of income growth in a province is positively related to income and growth in neighboring provinces. However, we find no evidence of such positive interdependence between growth in rich coastal provinces and their immediate inland neighbors. This suggests that there has been little synchronization in economic growth rates between these regions, and/or that the immediate hinterland of the coastal growth centers might have been bypassed as China’s manufacturing sector has migrated westward.

This article examines how economic shocks affect individual
well-being in developing countries. Using the case of a sudden
and unanticipated currency devaluation in Botswana as a
quasi-experiment, the article examines how this monetary
shock affects individuals’ evaluations of well-being. This is
done by using microlevel survey data, which—incidentally—
were collected in the days surrounding the devaluation.
The chance occurrence of the devaluation during the time
of the survey enables us to use pretreatment respondents,
surveyed before the devaluation, as approximate counterfactuals
for post-treatment respondents, surveyed after
the devaluation. Estimates show that the devaluation had
a large and significantly negative effect on individuals’
evaluations of subjective well-being. These results suggest
that macroeconomic shocks, such as unanticipated currency
devaluations, may have significant short-term costs
in the form of reductions in people’s sense of well-being.

This paper examines how economic shocks affect individual well-being in developing
countries. Using the case of a sudden and unanticipated currency devaluation in
Botswana as a quasi-experiment, we examine how this monetary shock affects
individuals’ evaluations of well-being. We do so by using micro-level survey data,
which – incidentally – was collected in the days surrounding the devaluation. The
chance occurrence of the devaluation during the time of the survey enables us to use
pre-treatment respondents, surveyed before the devaluation, as approximate
counterfactuals for post-treatment respondents, surveyed after the devaluation. Our
estimates show that the devaluation had a large and significantly negative effect on
individuals’ evaluations of subjective well-being. These results suggest that
macroeconomic shocks, such as unanticipated currency devaluations, may have
significant short-term costs in the form of reductions in people’s sense of well-being.

Standards have proven themselves indispensable to the industrial revolution. How are standards developed today? What does the economics of standards tell about the impact of standards upon economic growth and productivity? Do standards influence industry innovation? How are the standardization processes in the field of ICT taking place? How and why do open standards differ from other types of standards? How may open standards influence ICT government policy and the reverse: How will government need to take action in the face of the international trend toward open standards in ICT?

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This thesis is about how different e-participation user groups co-construct
technology through the use in practice. It is studied how technology is used on a
municipality level for citizen-communication and -participation with an online
debate forum as a case in point. Users of online debates are citizens, politicians
and the administration. In this thesis, I have chosen to focus on how politicians
and the administration use online debates. I show how politicians and the
administration participate in very distinct ways on the debate forum and thereby
create specific forms of citizen communication and participation. Everybody
can participate in the online debate as long as they give up their name and email.
Periodically, citizens write quite a lot of contributions on the debate
forum. But politicians’ and the administration’s perception of what is happening
on the debate influence which role the citizens’s contributions will have for the
politicians and administration, as well as forms of interaction between users. In
this thesis, I argue that the users’ (politicians’s and administration’s)
sensemaking about online debates as well as the mediation of the use of online
debates have a crucial influence on which types of practice of online debate can
develop.
Online debate is perceived as an equivocal technology in the sense that the
use of the technology is not clear cut but a result of the user’s sensemaking
about the technology and thereby the sensemaking about possible acts and interactions with the technology and other users. Sensemaking is the primary
theoretical frame with a special focus on situation-specific cue-frame-relations.
The Municipality of Odder is the case and a unique one with its 11 years of
experience within municipally facilitated online debate. The empirical data are
contributions written from September 3rd, 2005 to April 15, 2008 (a total of
1983 contributions), 17 semi-structured interviews of ½-1½ hours length with
administration and politicians in the municipality as well as different written
documents from the municipality.
In this thesis I show that politicians and administration act as users of the
online debate in four different ways: Political candidate, councilor,
administrator and mediator. The political candidate run for the municipal
election and is only present in the debate the last three months before the
election. The political candidate see online debates as a good opportunity to
make him/herself visible to voters and competing candidates, and therefore (s)he
writes a lot of contributions during this period. The political candidate rarely
answers ordinary citizen’s contributions but instead decides to write new
contributions or answer contributions started by competitors. The political
candidate rarely gets involved in real discussions on the debate but instead
choose to give his/her visions for the future of the Municipality of Odder.
The councilor see the debate as the citizen’s opportunity to voice their
meaning and therefore rarely participate in the debate, as this could have a
negative effect on citizens motivation to write on the debate. The councilor
reads the citizens’ contributions and once in a while the contributions act as
input for internal council discussions. When the contribution reflect
misunderstanding and when it is not only a few citizens who share the
misunderstanding, the councilor chooses to write a report for the debate. It is
usually the relevant committee chairman or equivalent who writes the
contribution.
The administrator believes that the majority of the contributions on the
debate are political and therefore (s)he should not participate in the debate. The
administrator sees citizens and business as partners. It is groups of professionals,
which cover associations, organizations etc. and does not necessarily, see the
individual citizen as a key stakeholder. The groups of professionals use other
media, such as mails and letters, in their communication with the administration,
as their input is often long reports and technical judgments. The administrator chooses only to answer factual misunderstandings in ongoing processes or more
general issues in the municipality.
The mediator, which is a role only a small part of the administration acts in,
generally works with the implementing and forming the use of technology in the
municipality. (S)he sees ICT as a way of increasing openness and effectiveness
in the municipality. Online debates is a solution which the mediator believes
especially increases openness and (s)he works with the aim of ensuring a
continued debate. The mediator focuses on maximizing the number of
contributions, on making it easy to participate and to make it possible to discuss
anything, which is why the debate is in no editor or guided use of the debate.
The result is that the individual user – political candidate, councilor and
administrator – mediate the use of the debate and develop filters for their own
and others’ ability to act on the online debate.
That politicians and administration appear in these four roles in relation to
online debate problematic several aspects of the use of e-participation practices
in a municipal context. One aspect is that the four roles develop different
practices for the use of the debate which function parallel on the debate without
the development of a common practice. A second aspect is that a mediator role
is established. An actor who mediates the interaction between citizen and
politician, and thereby an actor who has a high degree of importance for what
online debating becomes in practice. A third aspect is that the administration
takes the mediating role and becomes a political advisor or an administrator of
political decisions. A shift which neither the politicians nor the administrator are
aware of. At the same time, the way the technology is mediated creates both
synergy and conflict between the councilor, the political candidate and the
administrator. Synergy and conflict which primarily can be related to the focus
of the mediator on the increased use of the technology and the missing focus on
contextualization of the online debate.

There is general consensus that coordination and integration are needed to achieve efficient outcomes while distributed decision power and autonomous actions are essential to develop innovative responses. These dual requirements for operational optimization and ongoing business innovation capture the essence of organizational ambidexterity as the means to sustain performance over time when environmental conditions change. This paper incorporates strategic management and organization theoretical rationales in a model that combines elements of integration and experimentation in the strategy making process and thereby extends the evolving literature on the ambidextrous organization. The performance relationships of the ambidextrous integrative strategy making model are investigated on the basis of a cross-sectional sample of 185 business entities operating in different manufacturing industries. Results of structural equation analyses indicate that superior performance in the ambidextrous organizations is associated with efficiencies derived from adherence to centralized strategic planning and effectiveness generated by decentralized innovative behavior through participation and autonomous actions. The study enhances our understanding of ambidexterity as the result of combined strategy making processes that balance the needs for economic efficiency and organizational adaptability. Key words: Ambidexterity, Dispersed decision-making, Innovation, Participatory decision-making, Strategic planning